The film also indulges the strange reverse racism that seems endemic to the Vietnam movie, insisting that only the unit`s black leader, OD (Richard Brooks), has the instincts-street smarts? race memories?-to survive in the jungle. The unit is made up of the same too-careful mix of ethnic and personality types that characterized the propaganda films of World War II, and the relationships between the characters are largely restricted to a dewy macho romanticism-a weirdly eroticized view of pain and suffering. format, are much too clear and carefully lit.īehind his radical technique, Duncan reveals himself a disappointingly conventional dramatist. And while the soundtrack has an authentic roughness (to the point where much of the dialogue is unintelligible), the images, shot in the high-resolution super 16 mm. While it`s an effect that would even seem elegant in an overtly fictional film-it has something of Welles and Fuller in it-it`s fatally self-conscious here. Many of the shots-including, alas, the opening one- reveal a too careful choreography of actors and camera, as the members of the cast enter and leave the frame on cue. It`s a brave stylistic experiment, but Duncan`s film doesn`t always succeed on its own terms. The camera hits the ground, too, and keeps running through the near fatal encounter. Duncan is striving for absolute realism, and at times his film achieves a breath-snatching immediacy, as when the men, moving through some high grass, find themselves almost on top of a Vietnamese column on the march, and practically press themselves into the earth in their desperation to hide.
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